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Wednesday, June 15, 2011

Few cover NATO better than The Economist. Skippy linked to one of their graphs last week, but there is more to consider. It and another are in this post - I think they speak for themselves and flow quite well with SECDEF Gates's comments a couple of weeks ago.

ONCE they lobbied hard to join NATO. After Russia’s war with Georgia, they begged for coherent plans to defend them. But now the alliance’s eastern members are finding it hard to keep defence spending anywhere near 2% of GDP, the official NATO target they agreed to meet. ... But others are at 1% or even less, or are unrepentantly heading in that direction....Slovakia’s prime minister, says bluntly that defence is “not a priority”....America's ... defence spending, which, at nearly $700 billion, is bigger than that of the next 17 countries combined.

They end up with a phrase right off the front porch.

... why should outsiders bother to protect countries that won’t take their own defence seriously?

Exactly.

If you didn't catch last Sunday's Midrats, you need to. Some very good stuff on NATO's future and more. You'll find my thoughts and context there.

12 comments:

Anonymous
said...

If only militaries targeted capability instead of spending levels. We should be spending what is required, not some targeted level. When you tell the vendors your WTP, they'll always have products that you can buy up to that level of spending. It also doesn't force prioritization.

Well I'm pleased to see that my country at least (UK) is spending more than is required (though I fear for how much longer). It's just a shame we don't spend what actually need to on defence and instead spend it on the foreign development budget (after all that Indian space programe won't fund itself).

Speaking of NATO however, that’s been dead since we started adding countries that no one was actually going to defend once the chips were down. I mean speaking personally if someone attacks the US or Germany or a core NATO ally like that then I would be all in favour of a full military response. Now if it’s somewhere like Latvia on the other hand...

Well, if NATO gets disbanded I am all for Poland getting some nukes, Israeli style. Given about 50% chance of US president being someone Obamalike, bilateral pact with US is not much better.US getting inwardly centered is going to trigger worst nuke propagation wave in history, starting with the likes of S.Korea, Japan,Taiwan, possibly Poland and just about everyone in the Middle East.

That was a classic line from way back in the "Evil Empire" days though. The question from pol sci, game theory, and other civilian pundits was "Is the American President willing to trade [insert major US City Name Here] for Munich/Berlin/Bonn?"In the end the question was never tested during the Cold War. Now we are at peace, that same question is coming up and the question so far seems to be hard to gauge with regards to the American Political will and the American Civilian feelings.

How would neo-Imperalist Russia deal with Polish Nukes?I love Poland (had a crush on a polish girl in Jr. High :'( Would like to see Poland with some Tac Nukes (re: Israel)So how would NATO deal with that?

The only thing that I find unusual about these defense spending metrics is that there is any degree of surprise or outrage by anyone that things are the way they are. With Uncle ready to subsidize the world, including in excess of $B to a country hiding the most wanted/hated man in US history, why would we expect anything different. If anything I expect this trend to continue or get worse over the short term.

countries might not have friends forever, but sometimes have very aligned geopolitical interests - for example UK and US share interest in spoiling any attempts at European hegemony, be it German, Russian or French (yep, French were once terror of the land)

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